Jenufa, opera review: Triumph marks turning of seasons

This ENO season goes out on a high, with a heart-rending Jenufa conducted by Mark Wigglesworth
Heart-rending: Laura Wilde and Peter Hoare in Jenufa
Donald Cooper
Barry Millington27 June 2016

ENO and the adjective “embattled” are regularly bracketed these days, but you’d never guess from the season’s final two productions that the company was in trouble. Following a remarkable Tristan and Isolde, the season ends with a revival of David Alden’s terrific 2006 production of Janacek’s Jenufa that seems even more heart-rending than before.

There’s an irony in the fact that this revival is conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, the music director ENO allowed to slip through its fingers three months ago. Wigglesworth has an extraordinary grasp of this score and the orchestra play their hearts out for him.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the powerful second act, in which Jenufa’s stepmother, the formidable Kostelnicka, murders the baby of the unmarried heroine, fearing her stepdaughter will otherwise never be reaccepted into society. Time and again one registers the characters’ conflicting emotions through the score’s very textures — cushions of strings shot through with lacerating woodwind or horns, for example.

But what Wigglesworth also realises so successfully is the accumulating tension of the act, through to a chilling final curtain. Alden’s production convincingly relocates the action to a bleak 20th-century industrial estate in the Eastern bloc; intensely focused, it has surreal touches and engages with the music to overwhelming effect.

Five operas for beginners

1/5

Several singers are new to the production including the American soprano Laura Wilde, who brings an ideal blend of steel and lyrical beauty to the title role, Peter Hoare as a volcanic Laca, liable to erupt at any moment, and Nicky Spence as a towering, fresh-voiced yet emotionally vulnerable Steva.

Michaela Martens returns as a Kostelnicka with immense moral force and tone to match, but also projecting a certain humanity.

Until July 8, London Coliseum; eno.org

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